Showing posts: 121-135 of 236 total posts
My snow photos from February 16th to 18th are now posted in the photo section.
I posted this round of photos with Apple iPhoto 2. I did all the editing in iPhoto and created the gallery and their export from within iPhoto. I was somewhat pleased with the results. The output from iPhoto creates decent HTML markup with "alt" tags. The doctype is not exact, but there is one there.
Apple discusses PDF Workflow an shows how to uncover this gem. [Hat tip Dori]
The XML schema for Apple's Keynote explained in Technotes. This may come in handy in the not so distant future. [thanks to Daniel Steinberg for the heads up].
I have upgraded Apple's upgraded beta of Safari, X11 upgrade, and Mac OS X 10.2.4. These upgrades have my Mac zipping along again. I am not sure what happens with each upgrade, but the performance improves on my TiBook with each upgrade. I have yet to have any buggy nature with an Apple upgrade. On Windows every few upgrades from Microsoft would cause a minor or extravagant disaster and never did it make the machine run faster. Have I ever said how much I love Apple?
I finally found an application that does what I have been wanting one to do for some time. Audio Hijack for Mac OS X allows one to grab audio audio files and save them to AIFF. The audio can be coming from a DVD player, Flash files, or streaming audio. I have been seeking this to pull streaming audio of some of my favorite radio shows (Studio 360 and Marketplace) and timeshift them or more importantly play them with out an Internet connection or radio when travelling or commuting. Audio Hack has a timer to record at any time, so it is much like a Tivo for digital audio.
I started using iPhoto 2 last night and found it to be a nice improvement from the previous version. I did not use the first version often as it was not how I wanted to do things. The new release is very usable and I have imported many of my monthly archives into iPhoto and have used the enhance to bring out some nice touches. The Enhance tool is not quite perfect or consistent yet, but it is well worth a try on every photo as you can command-Z it right back.
James Duncan Davidson shares his 12 Hours with iPhoto 2 and Derrik Story offers his review in iPhoto 2, it's mostly good news. These two review offer a solid insight into the solid program that Apple is offering.
My next step is to test the build HTML page option, which is something I am missing at the moment on my Mac. I want good clean code, thumbnails build with ease, the ability to caption and "alt tag" the photos. My favorite application is Paul Bausch's snapGallery (does not or did not provide thumbnail option, but it was great clean and valid code that was easy to tweak) and closely followed by PhotoShop auto-generate gallerys option (this has a wonderful look and builds reduced versions of the main photos and thumbnails). I have not picked up PhotoShop for the Mac yet, but may do the Cross-Platform upgrade as I miss it. I will post the results of my postings in the near future.
Rumor has it Apple is working on MS Word replacement. This would be a great thing if it would read native Word files seemlessly, but even better would be turning out valid HTML/XHTML. MS Word has always made a huge mess of our information with its conversion to something it "calls" HTML, it is not even passable HTML. One could not get a job using what Microsoft outputs as HTML as a work sample, heck, it would not even pass the laugh test and it may get somebody fired.
One of the downsides of MS Office products is that they are created for styling of information not marking up information with structure, to which style can hang. MS Word allows people (if the turn on or keep the options turned on) to create information sculptures with structure and formatting of the information. What Word outputs to non-Word formats is an information blob that has lost nearly all of its structure and functionality in any other format. It does not really have the format the Word document to begin with. What Web developers do is put the structure back into the information blob to recreate an information sculpture again.
You ask why is structure important? Structure provides the insight to know what is a header and sub-header. Structure provides the ability to discern bulleted lists and outlines. Structure makes it script-kiddie easy to create a table of contents. Structure makes micro-content accessible and easier to find with search. Structure provides better context. Structure provides the ability to know what is a quote from an external document and point to it easily. Structure provides ease of information portability and mobile access easier. These just name a few uses of structure.
Does MS Word have this structure capability? Yes, do people use it? No really. If people use it does MS Word keep the structure? Rarely, as it usually turns the structure into style. This is much like a somebody who spent months in the gym to build a well defined physique only to have the muscles removed to stuff their own shirt with tissue paper to give it the look of being in shape. Does the person with the tissue paper muscles have the ability to perform the same as the person who is really in shape? Not even close.
Structure is important not only for the attributes listed above, but also for those people that have disabilities and depend on the information being structured to get the same understanding as a person with out disabilities. You say MS Word is an accessible application, you are mostly correct. Does it create accessible information documents? Barely at best. The best format for information structure lay in HTML/XHTML/XML not in styles.
One current place that structure is greatly valuable is Internet search. Google is the top search engine on the Internet. Google uses the text in hyperlinks, the information in title tags, and information in the heading tags to improve the findability of a Web page. What are these tagged elements? Structure.
One of the nice things about a valid HTML/XHTML Web document is I can see it aqnd use it on my cell phone or other mobile devices. You can navigate without buttons and read the page in chunks. Some systems preparse the pages and offer the ability to jump between headings to more quickly get to the information desired.
These are just a few reasons I am intrigued with the Apple rumor. There is hope for well structured documents that can output information in a structured form that can validate to the W3C standards, which browsers now use to properly render the information on the page. I have very little hope in the stories that MS is working toward an XML storage capability for Office documents, because we have heard this same story with the last few Office releases and all were functional lies.
You can now get Omni Outliner 2.2 beta 1, which includes the ability to import and export in and out of Apple Keynote presentations. I do a lot of thinking in Omni Outliner and really like the capability to pass these thoughts in outline format to presentation software. OmniOutliner already creates perfect XHTML as an output option, which has been a great asset so far.
I have been playing with Apple's Keynote today. Once I figured out that the adjustments and transitions are located in the inspection menu I was having fun. Now that I have a reason to use Keynote I am finding it a solid tool. I am now wishing for AppleScripts to connect OmniOutliner to Keynote. I would love to drop my outlines into Keynote and parse them into a presentation. I tend to think in outlines and use OmniOutliner quite a bit.
Hot damn Batman, I am loving the spell check feature in Apple's Safari browser. This should help the quality of the spelling here in Off the Top (I know you are disappointed and many believed the poor spelling was an ingenious method of for me to find my own entries, knowing this is my backup brain) and in comments on other sites. I tend to think in text boxes and e-mail and somewhat publicly.
Those of you that have not turned on the spell checking can find it under the edit menu in the spelling flyout and should check the "spell as you type" item. This item does not have a short cut, but it may be worth keeping turned on all the time.
Color me interested iStorm is a Mac-based collaboration tool available for under $20 (including two years of upgrades). I am involved in more than one project that is running virtually and this tool seems what it takes to get the job done and more (yes, most of those collaborating are Mac users, but not every single one -- yet).
Apple Scripts for Safari is a good place to watch for helpful tools. I am finding there is not a "mail link" in Safari, well that I could find. I may take my first whack at AppleScript to scratch this itch. [hat tip Jason]
Linux Journal digs to get the story on Apple's Safari and Konqueror.
Steve Jobs did the usual at the Macworld Keynote speach, great new products. The new 17 inch powerbook has severe lust factor as did the Airport Extreme with 802.11g (55MB of wireless connectivity and a USB print capability). The iLife tools are very cool and will be very helpful. But the two items that really got me intrigued were the Keynote a presentation tool and Safari Apples Web browser.
Keynote intrigued me from the beauty of it and its storing all the content in XML. The XML functionality could make reuse of the information in presentations actually usable, unlike the hardwork to extract content from PowerPoint. But, as we know presentation software is best with the speaking note or the spoken versions that go along with the presentation. Keynote could be a good first step. At least Apple is thinking in the right direction with a beautiful product that provides easy reuse.
Safari had me dying to get home to my Mac to download and test it. So far I am very impressed with not only the speed, which is great, but the proper rendering of pages. Safari handles XHTML and CSS box model beautifully. I only had so problems in Tantek's CSS examples. I went through much of Eric Meyer's CSS site worked very well with no discernable problems that I saw. I am very happy with it. It really could use back function on its right mouse menu. Time will tell if this replaces Chimera as my browser of choice.